Travelling a Planet Called Power Exchange

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Open Letter to a Young Top

Our community is made up of people who’ve never kinked and people who’ve been kinking for decades. There will always be kinksters who are more experienced than we are, purely by virtue of the fact that neither of us is 70 years old. We all start somewhere, and your lack of experience with floggers and whips is less important than you might think.

Yes, safety is imperative. Yes, workshops and moots are necessary. No, we shouldn’t go hitting people if we don’t know what we’re doing but your inexperience with such things doesn’t mean you won’t be valued by people in this community.

There are a hundred things more important than rope skill: integrity, wisdom, intelligence, humility. You are all these things. If I’m given a choice between a man with your character and the narcissist with the dojo who learned shibari on Mount Fuji, which he had to climb every day barefoot in the snow, I would choose the first guy. As a sub, rope skills and a fully stocked dungeon are only bells and whistles. The qualities that really matter are accessible to anyone who takes their personal growth seriously.

The traits you have are so rare you’re a virtual unicorn. Dominants with two decades of kink experience often lack them, and your character has as much value in vanilla relationships as it does in power exchange. Any sub who passes them by because you lack scene experience doesn’t deserve you. She probably wouldn’t suit you anyway.

You’ve put enormous effort into your kink life. You do parties. You go to workshops. You’ve approached all of this with an attitude of learning that few tops twice your age can demonstrate. You’ve worked hard to meet the people in the local scene. All of these things mean you’re treating every bottom you might get involved with compassionately before you’ve even met them. That’s admirable.

There are thousands of bottoms here hunting for tops and dominants who behave as you do. We want someone we can trust implicitly. That’s you. We want someone who treats us as people first and bottoms second. That’s you. Keep being you.